This Is What Job Creation Really Looks Like

In Washington, tax-cut conservatives face off against stimulus-now liberals to raise employment. In the real world, party orthodoxy crumbles and working solutions defy easy categorization.

Reuters

RALEIGH AND DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA -- In two small,
unassuming offices here, Bob Robinson and Eric Buckland are quietly
making heroic efforts to help the American middle class. But American
capitalism -- and the American government -- serve them both poorly.

The two men, the small businesses they painstakingly nurture and the
difficulties they encounter are on-the-ground examples of the broad
economic challenges the United States faces. Their stories do not
present easy answers. Instead, they put the lie to Republican and
Democratic orthodoxies regarding economic growth.

Start with Robinson. He is the executive director of the Raleigh Business & Technology Center,
a primarily government-funded effort to help the poor and middle-class
residents of southeast Raleigh start small businesses. The center -- and
the neighborhood it calls home -- shows how a high-tech boom that has
made Raleigh-Durham the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the U.S. nonetheless misses large segments of the population.

Southeast Raleigh has an unemployment rate of roughly 14 percent,
three times that of Chapel Hill and other nearby affluent communities.
Many local residents lack the education and skill levels needed to
obtain high-tech jobs. Instead of trying to launch Internet startups,
Robinson helps local entrepreneurs open flower shops, auto repair
garages and bakeries. Over the last two years, he has also trained and
placed 30 people in construction jobs. His new goal is to train people
for entry-level jobs at Wal-Mart and Wells Fargo.

"It's not all about technology," he said. "We need jobs immediately."

Just down the street from Robinson's center, the South Wilmington
Street Center for the homeless is filled to capacity. Frank Lawrence,
the shelter's director, said a decline in the construction industry hit
local lower-middle-class and poor households hardest. At the same time,
residents of other cities have flocked here after hearing of
Raleigh-Durham's boom.

"A lot of people moved here thinking there are jobs," Lawrence said. "But they don't have the skills to get them."

Robinson's center, though, doesn't neatly confirm liberal assumptions
about the failings of the private sector. Bo Marshall, one of the small
businesspeople Robinson's center trained, glows with pride when he
calls himself a "serial entrepreneur." An American sense of
self-reliance, not dependency, bubbles among the center's graduates. The
magic of owning a small business that Republicans love to extol is
palpable.

"They give us the essential tools," Marshall told me. "But it's up to the individual to get up and run with it."

Robinson said the center, which opened in 2000, tries to combine the
strengths of the private and public sectors. It helps inexperienced
contractors bid for public and private construction projects, trains
small business owners in marketing and introduces its graduates to local
banks.

"The best solutions that we are involved in include government
employees who are knowledgeable and capable of aligning policies and
procedures with small business owners' needs," Robinson said. "Along
with banks that we ask to reinvest and sustain."

A few miles to the north, Eric Buckland is trying to create
middle-class jobs as well, but in a completely different way. Buckland
is the president of Bioptigen, an 18-employee high-tech startup that manufactures handheld retinal scanners used by eye doctors and researchers.

The company is based in the Research Triangle Park, a famed
public-private partnership that over the last 50 years used skilled
graduates from nearby Duke University, North Carolina State and the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to draw major corporations.
Now, as multinationals trim research-and-development budgets or ship
such efforts overseas, park administrators try to keep rents low to
accommodate small, high tech firms like Bioptigen.

Buckland's company relies on a combination of sales, private "angel"
investors and federal research grants to function. Buckland says he is
confident about the company's future, but it struggled with cash flow
during the recession, dropping from 18 employees to eight. Like hundreds
of thousands of other small businesses, it does not offer the quick
returns and high profits that draw venture capital.

"It can't just be about billion-dollar wins that VCs target,"
Buckland told me. "We need investments in small and medium-size
companies that feed the ecosystem."

At the same time, the Food and Drug Administration is blocking
the sale of Bioptigen's clinical device in the United States. The
scanners are sold in four European countries, India and Australia but
are still awaiting approval from Washington.

"You have to balance two mutually exclusive goals," Buckland said.
"One is promoting innovation in the economy and the other is protecting
consumers against their fears. And the balance has shifted more toward
protecting consumers against their fears."

Buckland's views, though, don't fit Republican dogma. While
complaining about overregulation, he says the Obama stimulus definitely
worked. Research grants included in the package helped his small
business sell high-tech products to universities. And Buckland blames
budget brinksmanship by conservative Republicans for delaying a $2.7
million research grant he expected to receive in December.

"It's really horrible," Buckland said. "I think Congress has no idea of their impact on small business."

Both men expressed exasperation with Washington partisanship.
Robinson defended both the private and public sectors so vigorously that
I struggled to peg him politically. Buckland, despite complaining about
overregulation, said he leaned Democratic. Both called for pragmatism.

"My neighbor is a staunch Republican," Buckland said. "And we both
agree that if you can get reasonable people to sit down together, they
can reach an agreement."

"This polarization is killing us," he added. "We've got to get through that, if we're going to get through this malaise."